For Better or Worse: Christian Teachings on Marriage

SHOW NOTES:

What have some of the most popular authors and speakers on Christian marriage had to say over the past 5 decades? We’ll talk what’s good, what’s bad, and what we’ve believed to be true—before questioning our assumptions about what we’ve been taught God wants for our marriage relationships.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back to the Brave Marriage Podcast, a podcast for couples who want to grow as individuals, do marriage with intention, and live mutually empowered, purposeful lives. I hope wherever you are, that you’re doing well, and enjoying this series on marriage, mutuality, and gender roles. And thank you to those of you who’ve recently left ratings of the podcast, I really appreciate it. 

On today’s episode, we’re picking up where my conversation with Steve and Twyla left off. They had talked about having few resources available to them in the ‘70s as they got married, and I’d like to share a little bit of my story and context as well because what I plan to do today is talk about Christian resources, and especially Christian books on marriage, to help us think wisely about what we’re inputting and how we’re internalizing what it means to be married and to do marriage well as Christ-followers.

So I started reading Christian relationship books in the early 2000s, and back then, the only way to access those resources was through my local Christian bookstore. I lived in a small town and our church had a library, but it wasn’t regularly updated, and I wasn’t sure if my local public library would have the resources I was looking for, so what I had to choose from was whatever my local bookstore sold as Christian. So I picked up a few Christian books on male-female relationships in high school, one by Joshua Harris, one by John Eldredge, and one by Emerson Eggerichs. I read their books, and apart from seeing what was modeled for me at church and at home, I really didn’t have any explicit teaching on marriage, so I thought what I was reading was gold! You know, I started dating early, I was interested in counseling, and so I wanted to know the right way, as a young Christian girl, to go about dating and I hoped, one day, marriage. 

What I did then was I assimilated this information on marriage and male-female relating into my pre-existing schema, into my Christian worldview. I didn’t question what these books were saying; I trusted what these books were saying because I grew up in a small town and apart from youth group and theological conversations with my mom and grandmother, I didn’t know any better. I assumed that if someone was published, then they must be credible and trustworthy, and that what they’re saying in their books must be true. What’s more is that I could see myself in the godly woman role these men were describing. So I never doubted or had any qualms about what I was reading; I just wanted to do what was best and honoring to God! 

So I lived by these teachings, I internalized these messages, not even realizing they ran counter to my church doctrine! Because these authors seemed so sure of themselves, and I thought that by following them, I would not only be pleasing God but also my future husband. That’s just a little part of my story, I’m sure I’ll share more in bits and pieces in the future, but it wasn’t until grad school, until seminary, that my professor of Couples Counseling, Toddy Holeman, had us read Jack and Judith Balswick’s, A Model for Marriage: Covenant, Grace, Empowerment, and Intimacy that I realized: 1) the model for marriage I was reading in grad school resonated with me so much more than anything I’d read before—it felt more true to God’s nature, it felt more intuitive 2) perhaps this Christian teaching on marriage is qualitatively and fundamentally more Christ-like than any of the rules or roles that I was taught through other books, were Christian. 

If you’ve been listening for a long time, you’ll recognize the Balswicks’ names, as I mentioned them and their work on differentiated unity all the way back in episode #004, I believe. For the longest time, I hoped that teaching marriage differently—by teaching healthy relationship dynamics that align with Scripture as a Christian and as a licensed professional—would be sufficient to give listeners a better foundation for their marriages. But the longer I’ve been in the field and immersed in the world of marriage education in the church, the more earnest and eager I’ve become about shedding light on things that need to be exposed, in order that we might live healthier, lighter, freer, fuller, and more loving lives in Christ, within our homes, and within the Christian communities.  

So here’s my plan for this episode. I want to walk you through a few books that I was able to get my hands on in paperback form that I’ve read or others have read over the past five decades in the church. Taking one example from each decade, we’ll talk about what’s good, what’s bad, and after taking a look at each one, I’ll draw out a few themes that I want us to think about as we continue our conversation on marriage, mutuality, and gender roles in upcoming episodes. 

Starting in 1975 with psychologist James Dobson’s “What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women.” Most of the book talks about low self-esteem, depression, fatigue, loneliness, isolation, and financial, sexual, menstrual, and parenting problems, as wives and mothers experience them—from the perspective of Dr. Dobson. What’s good about this book is that I think Dobson is genuinely trying to help husbands at this time better understand their wives. He’s addressing the most common complaints he hears in his office or on his broadcast, and attempts to give men advice on how to love their wives better and remedy problems at home. 

What’s bad is that he tells men in chapter 5 that as husband, he is her sole reflector of self-esteem due to her being isolated at home; thus, he needs to take his job as head of the household seriously to save his wife from mental illness and to fulfill her emotional needs. He also encourages husbands to understand that wives need romance and emotional connection in the same way that husbands, as it was thought at that time, need their biologically-driven sexual appetites fulfilled—sooner rather than later. So I wonder, what parts of this teaching have you heard in the church and believed to be true? What of this do you not believe is true, but are still influenced by nonetheless in the way you relate in marriage or in what’s taught to you in your circles? 

It’s important to remember that Dobson’s teachings are coming out of a time where teachings on marriage were already “bad for women,” (as Steve Lee stated on episode 132), so rather than placing all the blame and responsibility for the husband’s attitude at home on the wife, Dobson seems to be trying to help wives by getting their husbands to take on some responsibility as well. As he wrote in his book, Straight Talk to Men and Their Wives in 1980: “For the man who appreciates the willingness of his wife to stand against the tide of public opinion—staying at home in her empty neighborhood in the exclusive company of jelly-faced toddlers and strong-willed adolescents—it is about time you gave her some help.” So he’s seeing the plight of wives in his work, those who’ve chosen to stay home, going against the cultural tide of change, who are sacrificing their own personhood and self-esteem, as evidenced by their mental health issues, for the sake of the family. But his solution is to try to get men to take better care of their wives. Believing that husbands are biblically called to be the head of the household, he encourages husbands to steward their household rule with benevolence, and loving leadership, rather than ruling their households with cruelty and abuse on the one hand, or passivity and disengagement on the other. 

So I can see where people thought at the time that this advice was helpful, healthy, and loving. Wives at this time probably appreciated Dobson’s advice, encouraging their husbands to do something different in order to relieve their pressure and depression at home. But time, distance, and research in social science shows us the deficiencies in this line of reasoning: 

1) Biological, psychological, and environmental factors all play into mental illness, so in the first line of chapter 2, to state that depression and apathy are merely a fact of life for women that needs to be dealt with and normalized in marriage is not only based on availability bias, but proven to be untrue. Furthermore, if a person’s depression is linked to environmental factors, the solution is not to prescribe more of the same that’s not working (in this case, hulling up in the house, relying on one’s partner to take care of them) but to help a client change environmental factors with the differentiated support of a spouse. 

2) To suggest that a husband is solely responsible for his wife’s sense of self-worth and self-esteem is an immense amount of pressure to place on a husband. If in the ‘50s, the advice of the day was for a woman to play a certain part so prop up her husband’s ego and to make sure he was happy at home, and if that contributed in part to a housewife’s mental health during those decades, then it’s illogical to reverse those roles, changing the advice in Christian spaces to get a husband to play a certain part to ensure his wife’s happiness. All we’re doing there is creating a system of relating in which both husbands and wives feel unhappy to some degree, overly responsible for their partners, and codependent on each other to now meet expectations that have been created through teachings such as this, that neither partner was ever meant to fulfill! 

I was just having a conversation yesterday with a former professor of mine and now colleague and she was saying how worried she is about the low self-esteem she sees among women and the purposelessness and lack of direction she sees among men; I can’t help but think that as a church, we’ve done this to ourselves! The loudest evangelical Christian teachings since the development of the love-based marriage have not led to our mutual flourishing, but instead, for many couples who buy into these teachings, to mutual discouragement with themselves, and their subsequent blame, shame, guilt, lack of freedom, lack of love, and misgivings with each other. (Somebody research that please.) 

3) While Dobson tries to convey the importance of emotional intimacy in marriage for women, in doing so, he diminishes the importance of emotional intimacy in marriage for men—when we know through attachment research that both men and women require a secure emotional attachment to relate in healthy ways with one another. Furthermore, on page 64, he says that men need respect for self-esteem purposes, while women need love for self-worth purposes. Again, both are true, but so is the other side of the coin, that men need love for self-worth purposes, and women need respect for self-esteem purposes. Sixteen years later, we’ll see this treatment of men and women needing love and respect differently in the handbook of complementarianism (which we’ll talk about next episode). And thirteen years after that, we’ll see a Christian psychologist and pastor write a NYT best-seller based on this treatment of a divergence of love and respect based on gender, encouraging couples to heal their marriages based on giving a woman the love she most desires and giving a man the respect he desperately needs. And what’s so wild to me is that when Dobson writes about love and respect, he acknowledges that he’s writing in gender stereotypes and overgeneralizations, and yet, the conventional wisdom for relating in conversative Christian circles holds these virtues as diametrically opposed—even though Paul’s instructions to couples in Ephesus were an outpouring of his instructions for those in the church to mutually submit to one another; not rigid rules for relating between men and women. 

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Next, we’ll look at the book, For Women Only, a book of essays by different authors, written in 1988. What’s good about it is, there are many essays written by many different people with different perspectives. For example, there’s an essay by Mary Lou Lacy encouraging women to grow up into spiritual maturity in Christ, seeking Him first daily, above all else, above husband, about children, above all, until women grow up into the fullness of Him, who is the Head, Christ, and learn to love God and others as Christ has called them to. 

However, there’s also an essay by televangelist Robert Schuller called What Does a Man Really Want in a Wife? Five things, he says: 1) a confidante, 2) a companion, 3) a creative climate-controller, and by that he means, his very own source of positivity and possibility-thinking at home—for “No man” he writes on page 116, “will ever leave, or stop loving, a positive-thinking wife who feeds his enthusiasm and self-confidence.” 4) for her to be his conscience, and 5) wait for it—that she be his “consecrated concubine.” He supports his desire for a consecrated concubine to fulfill his biological needs by saying, “we must never forget that God is responsible for this thing called sex” and “many counselors agree that sex is a primary cause of problems in marriage.” 

Now, this is where we see the breakdown between the knowledge of a mental health practitioner, and a Christian person or pastor with a platform disseminating pop psychology and using the Bible to back it up. At least in Dobson’s work, he understands that sexual problems more often expose relational problems in a marriage, rather than causing them, as Schuller misinterprets. But the difference is, Dobson is a parachurch professional, whereas Schuller is a televised pastor to whom evangelicals looked for spiritual guidance and spiritual wisdom on how to relate in marriage. On top of that, there’s a world of difference in what these teachings lead to. When a Christian psychologist understands sexual problems as exposing underlying relational ones, they’re at least a step closer to helping a couple get to the root of their issues. But if Christians are taught by pastors to believe that there’s a causal effect between a lack of sex and relational issues, then what happens in practice is that wives feel pressure to provide sex and husbands feel anxious about not getting it. So they end up doing this dance of pressuring, avoiding, and trying to create desire out of thin air, to solve their relational woes. But what they don’t see is that it’s the teaching itself, rather than the insufficiency of the wife or the enduring need of the husband, that’s perpetuating the problem rather than solving it. Sex and couples therapists will tell you that that type of pressure and perceived insufficiency leads to more problems, relationally, sexually, and psychologically, not less. But it’s hard to know that or to be convinced of that, when Christian leaders and shepherds use God to command their points, which prove unhelpful and harmful when applied to the Christian marriage. 

But again, I want you to ask yourself: Is this something you’ve heard in the church, or been taught in some way, or believed?

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Okay, now we’re getting into the ‘90s and what I want to point out is that by this time, research in the field of marriage and family therapy had advanced like never before. Both John Gottman and Sue Johnson had done years of research specifically on couples in marriage and intimate relationships. But when Dobson started writing his books to couples in the ‘70s, the study of marriage relationships was still in its infancy; the pioneers of my field were actually Dobson’s contemporaries because remember, the love-based marriage was extremely new in history, and how to do it well was still unknown. Dobson was a child psychologist who worked with Paul Popenoe, the father of marriage counseling, but Popenoe was a former eugenicist who wrote popular marriage advice—the same advice that Steve Lee said on last episode, was bad for women in the ‘40s-50s. So throughout the 20th century, we have the emergence of the field and study of intimacy in love-based marriage relationships, which paralleled teachings on marriage in the church, some of which was based on Scripture, but some of which was based on pop psychology and pseudoscience before there was actually empirically-validated scientific studies and evidence-based models for working effectively with couples. I just want you to keep that in mind. 

So in 1996, Gary Smalley wrote a book for Christian couples called Making Love Last Forever. What’s good about his book is a lot, compared to what I’ve shared thus far, and that’s because he combines Scripture and evidence-based principles found in marriage and family therapy. In part I, Smalley gives instructions on how to fall in love with life, the idea being taking personal responsibility before trying to make change in your relationship. And in part II, Smalley gives instructions for how to stay in love with your spouse, getting at the fact that love is a personal choice and decision. Both of these overarching principles are good. 

What’s bad though, is the perpetuation of gender-based stereotypes which don’t fit all couples. For example, in Ch. 11, entitled “How to Bring Out the Best in Your Maddening Mate,” he highlights how men love to share facts, while women love to share feelings. On p. 192, he says, “there’s one particular thing we men wish we could control about our wives—sex whenever we want it! But as we’ll see in chapter 14, that’s not how good sex works.” So I’ll give him credit for saying that’s not how good sex works. But I get so frustrated with the perpetuation of stereotypes, because in my practice, thanks to Olsen’s premarital research in the ‘80s, I have premarital reports that directly express the opposite—both in regard to sexual desire and the communication of fact versus feeling. So when couples are taught that these traits are gender-normative, how are they supposed to feel about themselves when they’re wired differently than what these books they’re reading are purporting? I hear these questions time and again from husbands and wives in my own practice who feel, in some way, deficient because their personality or desires don’t line up not only with what our society calls masculine or feminine, but what the church and Christian authors like this, have set out as normative and typical! 

Smalley makes a few points about gender differences that I would call conditioning, such as men tend to be independent, while women tend to be interdependent, and men tend to compete and be controlling, while women tend to cooperate and be agreeable. Twenty years earlier, Dobson observed that women could also be competitive with one another, and in 1991, the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was sure to point out that it’s women who tend to be controlling of men and therefore, need to heed the advice of remaining agreeable and cooperative. 

So how, as the church, are we to make sense of gender differences when all of these authors are saying different things about men and women in their books, based on what they’re seeing in their own work with couples? Well, there are a few things that are important to remember: 

1) Men and women are biologically different in some ways, yes, but they are also culturally conditioned to behave differently over time. The traits that are labelled masculine or feminine in a given time and place don’t stay the same over time; rather, they change and reflect their culture.

2) Men and women are no more prone, disposition-wise, to certain personality traits than the opposite gender. Men and women can both exhibit independence, competitiveness, cooperation, a desire to control, or a desire to be agreeable. Again, I have many research-based premarital reports which say that each of these traits can and do exist in both genders. So what service are we doing to couples when we speak in broad strokes without looking at each individual person and relationship?

3) We are all prone to cognitive biases and attribution errors. The problem is, when we aren’t aware of our bias or blind spots, we teach solutions to problems as we see them—not as they actually are. In the case of these authors, they see the issues as gender-based rather than culturally-based, and so they apply a medical model to treating couples, linear logic that might alleviate symptoms in the short term, but do nothing to actually help couples long-term, especially when systemic issues are at play. What’s worse, is that they call this truth God’s truth, and at that point, couples not only have relational injuries to address, but emotional and psychological injuries as a result of Scriptural misuse.
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Let’s take a look at another example of this, moving into the 21st century: Emerson Eggerichs’ best-selling Christian book, Love and Respect, written in 2004. Starting with what’s good about the book, Eggerichs does use the family systems principle of feedback loops in his book. And I think this book had such huge success because for the first time in Christian literature, a psychologically trained Christian minister is saying, hey, these issues you’re facing are cyclical—and he names this dynamic “the crazy cycle.” 

What’s bad about this book is that it virtually names every couple’s dynamic as the same in conflict, while research shows that couples tend to have 1 of 3 different dynamics in conflict. But according to Eggerichs, when couples get into conflict, the problem is that conflict makes most men feel disrespected, while women tend to feel unloved. In contrast, eight years earlier, Gary Smalley quoted Deborah Tannen in his chapter on what drives one’s mate mad, quote: “Many women could learn from men to accept some conflict and difference without seeing it as a threat to intimacy; and any men could learn from women to accept interdependence without seeing it as a threat to their freedom.” 

So, who’s more right? Smalley, in his suggestion that men can better tolerate conflict than women, but that men don’t like feeling like their freedom is threatened? Or Eggerichs’, when he suggests that what men fear most is disrespect, and conflict makes most men feel disrespected? Well, I would say that no human likes feeling disrespected or like their freedom is threatened. So to me, their differing emphases seem more like matters of personal experience than matters of universal truth. For example, Eggerichs’ confesses his own intolerance of being disrespected when on p. 68, he writes, “There are many wives who tell me, ‘Respect and love are the same thing.’ I respond, ‘No, they aren’t, and you know they aren’t.’” “The bottom line is that husbands and wives have needs that are truly equal. She needs unconditional love, and he needs unconditional respect.” 

So from there, the author spends the book outlining his solution, what he’s named “the energizing cycle,” assuring readers that the cycle will be broken if wives and husbands could just learn to spell love and respect, respectively. To spell love to women, Eggerichs tells men that a wife wants her husband to be close, open, understanding, peacemaking, loyal, and in agreement with Dobson, to provide her with self-esteem. On the other hand, he tells women that a husband wants his wife to appreciate his conquest, hierarchy, authority, insight, sex drive, and desire for friendship. On page 252, he uses a case study of a woman who calls her mom to tell her they won’t make it to visit her parents that day because her husband is upset. The mother asks why and the daughter responds, “I suppose because we have not been sexually intimate for seven days.” Eggerichs goes on to say that the mom “let her daughter have it,” replying, “You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Why would you deprive him of something that takes such a short amount of time and makes him soooooo happy?” 

Again I ask, have you believed this to be true. This shame-based motivation for marital change is a common pattern I’ve seen in Christian teachings on marriage throughout the past few decades. Certainly not all books lead with shame, but it occurs to me that some of the best-selling Christian marriage books do. I’d love to know what’s going on there, that we’d prefer to have shots fired at us, borrowing a phrase from Dobson, than to have someone teach on love in marriage in a way that leads to life and grace and the truth spoken in love.

The last book in my literature review through the past five decades is, A Model for Marriage by Jack and Judith Balswick. The premise of their book is that by looking at the way the Trinity relates, we can take a few different principles and apply them universally to our relationships in a way that will lead all couples, through all times, in all places, toward life, love, and health relationally, and those are the principles of covenant love, grace-filled love, mutual empowerment and servanthood, and the intimacy of knowing and being known. 

In Romans 1:16-25, Paul talks about the power of Gospel and how as humans, we are without excuse when we exchange truth for lies and choose to worship created things rather than the Creator because he says, “for what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.” And I tend to think that when human-made principles are applied universally, the fruit of such teachings are exposed, as I believe we’re seeing more clearly today in the evangelical church. But when the power of the Gospel is taught correctly, it brings life and health in its transformation of individuals and couples, not death and dysfunction. So I think we have to look at what we’ve been taught, for better or worse, about Christian marriage, and evaluate it accordingly. Does a teaching lead couples closer to Christ and toward freedom and intimacy with each other, or does a teaching lead couples away from Christ or from true intimacy with each other?

To contrast the Balswicks’ teaching on sexuality with the previous books we’ve looked at, they make no mention of gender differences except to say that it's in our being created male and female that we move toward knowing and being known through emotional and sexual intimacy, and that by communing together in sexual union, we reflect the full image of God. On p. 165, they affirm that the erotic expression between the lovers in Song of Solomon goes beyond sexual desire to a longing for the lover, him or herself, making sex a person-centered experience rather than a husband-centered experience that wives are shamed to participate in. Imagine how much difference teachings like these could make if they were the ones primarily taught to couples in the church! 

My main hope for this episode is that you feel caught up to speed on where we are today in the church as it relates to teachings on marriage. This series so far has been in no way exhaustive and there’s so much more I could share, but I think this will give you a good foundation for thinking about what you’ve been taught and why, and how these messages have impacted couples in the church. The most interesting thing to me the more I’ve learned and studied this topic is being able to see how conventional wisdom morphs and changes over time, but how influenced we still are by many of these messages, not really realizing or understanding where they come from. 

Stay tuned for the next two episodes where we’ll dive into Egalitarianism and Complementarianism, to find out what those mean and why it matters to your marriage. Thank you so much for listening to the Brave Marriage Podcast. I’m your host, Kensi Duszynski. Podcast editing is by Evan Duszynski. Music is by John Tibbs. Have a great week and I’ll talk to you again soon. 

Doing Marriage with Intention w/ Steve & Twyla Lee - Ep. 132

Dr. Steve & Twyla Lee

…with an emotional Kensi Techau Duszynski upon graduating from Focus Leadership Institute, with the Lees as her first marriage and family professors in the fall of 2010.

SHOW NOTES:

Join me in conversation with Steve and Twyla Lee as we talk about their 47 years of marriage experience, plus 30 years of professional experience as Christians who work in the social sciences. As my first marriage and family studies professors, I had the privilege of learning from them personally and professionally as well. Today, they work with premarital couples all over the US at intentionalrelationships.org.

The Emergence of Complementarity and the Love-Based Marriage - Ep. 131

SHOW NOTES:

Did you know that the concept of marrying for love is only 200-300 years old? In this episode, we trace the love-based marriage back to its roots in the Enlightenment. Here, we’ll discover the emergence of complementarity as a way for society to promote social order and marriage cohesion in this brave new world, which rocked the five millennia -long foundation of the patriarchal structuring of marriage, family, and society. We’ll also explore the idea that while secular culture abandoned complementarity within gender hierarchy after the 1950s, certain parts of the evangelical church locked it in instead of envisioning a better way forward for Christian couples and families in the 20th-21st centuries.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back to the Brave Marriage Podcast, a podcast for couples who want to grow as individuals, do marriage with intention, and live mutually empowered, purposeful lives. You are listening to season 2, where we are beginning a conversation around marriage, mutuality, and gender roles. 

Last week, we took a look at marriage in the 1950s, because to me, it sort of marks the decade where culture went one way and Christians went another when it comes to marriage, family, and sexuality. Many Evangelical Christians said, “the 1950s align more closely with our moral values and our holiness traditions so we’ll hold onto that good, thank you very much,” while secular culture said, “in a world where women and racial minorities have more rights than ever and are still working toward a more equitable world, the 1950s are regressive and oppressive, so we’ll keep working in the decades ahead to address the bad, thank you very much.” …I have to wonder, what kind of world could we create if we could tolerate the tension and work to hold onto the good and address the bad at the same time?

But to be honest with you, I don’t think either side has figured out the healthiest way to marriage, family, and sex in a postmodern society. It seems like secular culture is working toward new ideals, however healthy or misguided, while conservative Christianity is working to reverse the present by trying to hold onto the past. 

But here’s the piece I think that both camps are missing, and why we haven’t quite figured out how to do marriage, family, and sexuality in a way that’s productive to society as it is today, and it’s this: We forget how new the construct of the love-based marriage is—the love-based marriage meaning, this romanticized way of viewing marriage like we do today and the complementary structuring of gender roles. And this model of marriage, is honestly, still in its infancy, or at least, its toddler years, and so I think it will take us more time to develop an understanding of marriage, in general, and of Christian marriage, in particular, that resonates with 21st century couples.

So on this episode, we’re looking back even further than the 1950s to see that the nuclear family, along with its breadwinning husband and homemaking wife actually marked the end of the Western social experiment in which couples across the board, secular and Christian alike, tried to maintain traditional, hierarchical, split-sphered gender roles once love became the basis for marriage. 

As we discussed in episode 98, entitled: Your Spouse is Not Responsible for Your Happiness, marrying for love is a concept as new as the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a period in history, about 200-300 years ago, where philosophers, culture-makers, and eventually, the everyday couple looked to reason, progress, and individualism as their guiding principles. And when progress and individualism became values over and above stability and the common good, people’s ideas about marriage began to transition, too. Prior to the Enlightenment, marriage was collectively thought of as a social responsibility. But during and then especially, after the Enlightenment, people began to see marriage as an individual right. Thus, one’s marriage partner became a personal choice, rather than an arrangement and commitment made for the greater social good. 

And this new love-based marriage was really disorienting and destabilizing to the way society had previously been structured. If you can wrap your mind around this, never before in history had people married for love. They’d only married for social order, social standing, political gain, and economic stability—so if love occurred in a marriage, it was a happy accident, a byproduct of a good match all-around, or the result of genuinely committed Christians who adhered to Paul’s radical teachings at the time to mutually love and submit to one another. But romantic love had nothing to do with the purpose of the marriage itself during that time. That time being, the thousands and thousands of years before the Enlightenment, the Victorian Era, and the Industrial Revolution. In fact, when you look at marriage throughout history, many people found romantic love outside of their marriages, instead of within it, just to show you how new the blending of romantic love within a committed, faithful marriage is. So the idea of choosing a marriage partner yourself, and choosing that partner based on love and emotional fulfillment was still in its infancy during that time, a grand social experiment like the world had never seen before. 

And as you can imagine, some lawyers, politicians and others who held up society at the time were freaking out. They were afraid of what these marital changes and individual values would do to society. Because if hierarchical marriage and marriage structures had previously been the bedrock of a stable society, and now, people were marrying for love, an extremely unstable emotion, then understandably, questions emerged like, what will keep a couple’s personal whims from pulling their marriage and subsequently, from pulling society apart, as the thinking went? If people start choosing their marriage partners based on really fickle ideas, like love and personal happiness, then what will keep them choosing each other when romantic love fades and real life hits? How is a society supposed to maintain social order if couples no longer personally value commitment and stability? And if couples marry for love, then what social constraints are there to keep couples, families, and societies together, as before? When individualism runs counter to the permanence of marriage, and equality runs counter to the long-held social order, how can we promote the stabilization of marriage relationships? 

So it’s here, in this era, only 200-300 years ago, that we begin to see the idea of complementarity set within gender hierarchy emerge. Complementarity is the idea that men and women are two halves of a whole, without whom each gender would be incomplete. 

Prior to the emergence of complementarian teaching within gender hierarchy, men and women lived in a world where gender roles were a given. Everyone lived in a male-centric society, and women were long thought of as the lesser, inferior sex. Thus, there was no need to promote gender-based complementarity; there was only the need to uphold it by law to keep individual households and the social order intact. 

For example, for thousands of years, under the law, wives were to defer to husbands as lord and master. Husbands had final decision-making power, and rights to women, property, sex, and the like. And even though we’ve come a long way, we still see the lasting effects of this male-centric society in the law, in the church, and in cultural attitudes. For example, until 1979, the state of Louisiana still upheld head and master laws, which said that husbands had the final say on all household and property decisions, and could do whatever he wanted with their joint property, without his wife’s knowledge or consent. And as late as 1993, marital rape was still legal and unpunishable by law in Oklahoma and North Carolina, whereas other states took to repealing the allowance of marital rape from the 1970s on.

So before the Enlightenment, when laws like this were the norm, and not the exception, complementarity was not needed to pacify men and women because a patriarchal society was assumed, rather than challenged. 

But starting around the 18th century, several philosophical ideals began to converge to challenge this male headship structure, like the value of personal choice, individualism, love-based marriage and with that, the desire to marry for love and intimacy, not just commitment and stability.  

The fear then for traditionalists was that equality paired with individualism would lead men and women to make choices based on their own personal, private good, rather than the good of society as a whole, and that these things might even lead men and women to believe that they didn’t need each other, that they might find they were fine on their own instead of fulfillment in marriage and family, which couples in the Enlightenment now sought. Articulating some of this fear in 1767, Dutch journalist and preacher Cornelius van Engelen wrote: “Were a woman to have the same authority as a man, or a man the same kind-heartedness as a woman, the former possessing a man’s courage and resolve, the latter women’s tenderness and charm, then they would be independent of one another,” (Coontz, 2005). 

So complementarity seemed to address at least growing concerns about individualism. And the gender hierarchy already embedded into culture allowed for complementarity to do its work concerning gender equality in marriage. 

As Stephanie Coontz writes in her book, Marriage: A History: 

“At the beginning of the 19th century, the doctrine that men and women had innately different natures and occupied separate spheres of life seemed to answer these questions without unleashing the radical demands [of love, individualism, and equality] that had rocked society in the 1790s. 

The doctrine of separate spheres held back the inherently individualistic nature of the “pursuit of happiness” by making men and women dependent upon each other and insisting that each gender was incomplete without marriage. It justified women’s confinement to the home without having to rely on patriarchal assertions about men’s right to rule. Women would not aspire to public roles beyond the home because they could exercise their moral sway over their husbands and through them over society at large. Men were protecting women, not dominating them, by reserving political and economic roles for themselves.” (p. 176)

Okay, so this will be another episode for another time, but the idea of holding sway over one’s spouse is manipulation, not intimacy, and it’s also no different than the political marriages and power couples of the past. And then this idea that each gender is incomplete without the other reminds me of a few things: 1) Every 20th century Hollywood romance movie ever made. 2) Every Victorian era book ever written and then turned into a Hollywood movie. 3) This quote from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (1991): 

“The woman is the man’s helper. The man was not created to help the woman, but the reverse. Doesn’t this striking fact suggest that manhood and womanhood are distinct and non-reversible? Doesn’t this make sense if we allow that, while the man and the woman are to love each other as equals, they are not to love each other in the same way? The man is to love his wife by accepting the primary responsibility for making their partnership a platform displaying God’s glory, and the woman is to love her husband by supporting him in that godly undertaking.

So, was Eve Adam’s equal? Yes and no. She was his spiritual equal and, unlike the animals, “suitable for him.” But she was not his equal in that she was his “helper.” (Piper, Grudem, et. al, ch. 3, p. 91). 

And in upcoming episodes, we’re going to explore complementarian and egalitarian theology, and in a way where we get a sense of both perspectives, but at this point, I do want to distinguish between two things. There’s gender-based complementarity…and then there’s gender-based hierarchy. And like we said before, gender-based complementarity is not a problem. We are created male and female; we know this, we understand it. But want I want you to understand is that both gender-based complementarity and hierarchy are subtly baked into the cultural teachings of the 1800-1900s, and in many of the later Christian teachings in the late 1900s and early 2000s. And I want you to remember that complementarity within gender hierarchy is an idea that emerged in the Enlightenment as a way to address individualism and growing equality in a changing culture. It’s what led to husbands and wives occupying separate spheres in an Industrial society. And it’s what led to the model of the 1950s marriage and family—that as long as men stick to breadwinning and taking care of their wives and children, and as long as women stick to homemaking and taking care of their husbands and children, then together, but separately, and in love, we’ll each be doing our part to work for the collective good of marriage, family, and society. 

Yes, this was able to be achieved because of a decade of growth, wealth, and stability after the war, like we talked about last episode, but it was also the climax of an effort to help couples and families thrive in this brave new world of the love-based marriage, which was only about 150 years old at the time.

And on the surface, this seems sweet and true, because parts of it are. It seems like an honorable sentiment for those who’ve only ever seen themselves in that picture. And it sounded good to me on the surface up until I started diving deeply into this subject to entangle what’s true from what’s not in order to effectively and ethically help couples today who marry for love and who also desire to follow Christ.

And listen, I get the fears of the time, I do. I, by nature, am someone who is slow to change and slow to action, so I can even appreciate the train of thought that goes, “we’re just trying to apply responsible solutions and stave off progress too quickly in this life-altering, trajectory-changing reality we find ourselves in.” It’s just that I’ve lived on the other side of history long enough to realize that promoting marital hierarchy isn’t the only, or best way for that matter, to promote love and intimacy in marriage in our modern Western world where men and women’s rights are more equitable than ever before.  

As a systemically trained marriage and family therapist who’s worked with so many couples, I’ve watched this soul-mate, gender-based, hierarchical model for marriage breed enmeshment, dependence, resentment, manipulation, spiritual abuse, and the stalling of adult development, rather than life and health and wholeness.

But complementarity, in and of itself, is not an unbiblical idea. It’s when it’s paired with God-ordained hierarchy and extrabiblical gender roles that complementarity gets twisted into something that doesn’t work for so many people. 

And so it seems to me that our society’s second attempt at making hierarchical marriage work in the modern world, reached the peak of its relevance in the ‘50s and has been exposing its underbelly ever since.

It also seems to me that just because complementarity was the first solution applied to the love-based marriage and then taken on by the church, doesn’t mean it has to be the last—at least, in its culturally remnant form!

The conversation I’m trying to start for anyone willing to have it, is not about whether or not husbands should structure their marriages to have more traditional or equalitarian roles within their own home. And this isn’t about whether or not wives should stay at home or enter the workforce, because the privilege of living in a wealthy society with equal rights is that we can choose to do either, or both. This is a conversation about learning from history and taking a look at the recent past to see if we can’t discover a better, healthier, more life-giving way forward for couples, for families, for society, and for the church at large, the true family of God. 

Because as far as I can tell, when we look at and study the whole Bible as the inspired word of God as told through a primarily Jewish worldview in a middle Eastern context, what we see is God’s love for all of humanity, His rescue and restoration of the poor and the oppressed, and His desire for us as men and women, as husbands and wives, as children and adults, to all be one in Christ. And when we look at Jesus’ ministry and teachings on His coming kingdom, it seems to look far less like what we’re comfortable and familiar with, and far more like Jesus did—imagine that—when He came as King in the form of a baby, or when He revealed Himself first as the Son of God, not to the masses or spiritual elite, but to a marginalized woman at the well. When He served His disciples by washing their feet, or when He sacrificed himself all the way to the cross to demonstrate His Lordship over all the earth, His Headship over the church, and His Saving Power in our lives.

I’m hoping that us starting this conversation on marriage, mutuality, and gender roles, within an understanding of history—both recent history over the past 200-300 hundred years, as well as ancient history, in the context in which the Bible was written—that we’ll be able to get to Truth about marriage and mutuality and gender roles. That we’ll be able to take a look at the marriage education that emerged in the late 20th century and evaluate it based on Truth, and our understanding of its context, which we’ll do in upcoming episodes.

But before we get there, and before we get to an understanding of complementarian and egalitarian theology, I’ve had the privilege of sitting down with my first ever marriage and family professors, who have their own experience to share with us, their own understanding of how marriage education developed over their lifetime, and as professionals, and who just have a wealth of knowledge to share with us so I’m really excited for you to get to hear my conversation with them next time.

In the meantime, thank you for listening. I’m your host, Kensi Duszynski. Podcast editing is by Evan Duszynski. Music is by John Tibbs. We hope you have a great week, share this with someone, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

Citations from this Episode:

Coontz, S. (2005). Marriage, A History.

Piper, J., Grudem, W., et. al. (1991). Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood.

How the 1950s Defined Marriage as We Know It - Ep. 130

SHOW NOTES:

We’re starting this conversation with a little understanding of history, how the 1950s defined marriage and split-sphere gender roles as we know them today.

Together, we’ll consider this question: If Paul tells us in Romans 12:2 not to conform to the patterns of this world, then why does so much of what we’re taught today in the church reflect the culture of marriage in 1950s America rather than mirroring Christ?

Join Kensi Duszynski this fall as she facilitates a conversation around marital health, relational dynamics, and the proper place of gender roles in Christian marriage.

Conversations will take place biweekly.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back to the Brave Marriage Podcast, a podcast for couples who want to grow as individuals, do marriage with intention, and live mutually empowered, purposeful lives. I’m Kensi Duszynski, a licensed marriage and family therapist and certified professional coach. And you are listening to episode 1 of season 2, where ready or not, like I said in the trailer, we will be diving into a conversation every other week around marriage, mutuality, and gender roles. 

I know we have some new folks listening, so just to give you a little bit of background on who it is you’re listening to, I am someone who grew up in the church in a small town in Kentucky. I felt called to ministry as a teenager, was commissioned in that calling by my church body, and have spent my vocational life pretty much ever since in marriage ministry, if you will, which for me, has taken the shape of becoming a licensed practitioner and working with married couples in the Bible Belt. I studied at Focus on the Family’s Leadership Institute in college, where I learned about what has come to be known as biblical manhood and womanhood, I graduated from Asbury University, where we talked a lot about the integration of psychology and theology, I attended Asbury Theological Seminary where I learned evidence-based practices of couples therapy, and then I worked toward my license as a MFT for four years after grad school. And I’m getting to the age now where I can look back on my reading and study of marriage over the past 15 years or so and compare it to what I’ve seen in my work with couples over the past 8 years or so, and see what is actually helpful and actually true when it comes to helping couples and what’s not. So season 2 is really a passion project for me to synthesize all these ideas, and I appreciate you coming along for the ride! 

As I’ve been thinking about where to start this series, I knew I couldn’t start with what’s good, what’s bad, and here’s why as a therapist, because I know, as someone who’s grown up in the Christian community, how deeply we hold some of our ideas about marriage and what it means to be a good husband or wife. I also know, having grown up in a rural area, that some can feel mistrusting of psychology and therapy and don’t even know how to conceptualize mental and emotional health as something as important as physical health. I know that when it comes to relationships, those of us who’ve grown up in conservative families and churches trust what we’ve been taught about marriage and gender roles there, even if we’ve also been influenced by the media and culture around us. 

So instead, I decided to start this conversation about marriage, mutuality, and gender roles with a little understanding of history. Because when we’re inside of a certain context, like right now, as we’re living through history, it can be hard to step outside of it, to take a look at it, to examine it, and to evaluate it based on its strengths and weaknesses. But personally, when I began to understand marriage in the context of history, that’s the place where I was finally able to assimilate all these ideas and come to my understanding of what I’ve seen in the church, versus what I’ve seen in marriage therapy literature, versus what I’ve seen in my office. 

So here’s what we’re gonna do: In order to examine marriage as we understand it today, we’re gonna start by taking a look at marriage in a decade before most of you listening were born: the 1950s. The first time I ever thought about marriage throughout history was in 2010 at the Focus Leadership Institute, where I had my first marriage and family studies course. Our professors, as kind of a warm up exercise, had written each decade from the 20th century on a piece of poster board, and spaced them out around the perimeter of the room. And they instructed us to go and stand in front of the decade in which we thought we’d most want to live, if we could—to choose the decade that we thought had the best that marriage and family life had to offer. 

Okay, so there were 44 of us, and as 20-somethings who grew up in the ‘90s, most people ended up in front of the 1970s posters or later. I, on the other hand, had grown up watching reruns of I Love Lucy, Happy Days, and the movie remake of Leave It to Beaver, so I stood in front of the 1950s poster, along with one other classmate who chose that decade because she liked the idea of wearing pearls and poodle skirts, that was her reasoning. But when asked why I chose that decade, I said something about how it seemed like the 1950s held all these moral values that growing up in the church, I’d learned were a part of Christian living. And so, from what I’d seen on TV, it seemed like the 1950s were a pretty ideal place for Christian families to live.

…And that’s when I got my first education on just how little I understood about the history of Christian marriage in America. 

So I would like to do a little exercise with you. I’d like you to use your imagination to travel back in time with me to the mid-1950s. Eisenhower is President of the United States, and we’re about 20 years removed from the end of the Great Depression, and about 10 years post-World War II. Compare that with the distance we are today from 9/11 and the recession of 2008. So understandably, between Truman and Eisenhower’s presidencies, lots of effort has gone into re-stabilizing society and the economy upon the return of millions of WWII veterans. This effort is seen in government programs like the GI Bill, which provided unemployment aid, education, and mortgage assistance to millions of American veterans. It’s seen in strengthening the image of America as a strong, militarized nation, armed with a capitalist economy and Christian family values. And it’s seen in the emergence of the ideal American family: the white, middle-class nuclear family with a breadwinning husband who works outside the home, and a stay-at-home wife, who works within the home to keep her family strong. 

Can you bring to mind the image of Rosie the Riveter? Well, if she was the model picture of a woman in the 1940s, a woman who stepped up and served and worked to aid in the war effort on behalf of her country, then upon WWII veterans’ return, Rosie the Riveter was replaced with the image of June Cleaver as the ideal 1950s woman. 

So imagine you’re a married person doing life in this 1950s world. Some societal and economic stabilization has been achieved, and if you’re white and above the poverty line, you’re enjoying the benefits of this in a disproportionate scale to your black neighbors. I say this to indicate here that many black Americans weren’t granted equal access to things like VA mortgage loans or suburban housing due to some legalese in the GI Bill that placed federal benefits in the hands of the state, many of whom were still operating under Jim Crow laws and racial segregation in the south. 

But on the whole, the economy is flourishing such that compared to what’s been called “the prosperous twenties,” the middle class in America has nearly doubled, as has your discretionary income. In the mid-1950s, this means wealth building, again, especially if you’re white and benefiting from government programs, and extra money for things like houses with separate bedrooms for everyone, a second car, a new TV, and modern kitchen appliances.

So you’ve just endured a few decades there of recession, of war, and of hardship. And in a matter of ten years after the war, you find yourself the recipient of a quaint little home in the new suburbs, with a church of your denomination not too far away. You can now rest easy in the assurance that you live in a safe, Christian nation, which you’re reminded of every time you say the Pledge of Allegiance, which now, includes the phrase “one nation under God,” or every time you spend your new discretionary income because of the recent addition of “In God We Trust” that’s been added to all US currency. I mean, compared to what you’ve known, this is ideal, this is the good life. This is the epitome of the American dream. 

And as a middle-class couple living in the 1950s, you find yourself enamored with a couple of things: First of all, new and improved home technologies that you can now afford, like the washing machine, an electric dryer, a refrigerator/freezer combo, the vacuum cleaner, all things that promise to make your home life more convenient. K, this is like the Alexa or the Roomba of the 1950s. And on the topic of home life, the second thing you find yourself all consumed by is how to construct this nuclear family ideal that you’re seeing everywhere in mass media and pop culture. From TV shows and magazine ads, to family experts and marriage advice columns, it seems like all efforts are being aimed at solidifying and reinforcing rigid male-female gender roles. 

From Hoover vacuums, you see ads that read, “She’ll be happier with a Hoover.” From a refrigerator company, you see a blindfolded mom holding the hand of a child while her husband presents her new fridge. The copy reads, “The surprise of her life…and the best!” From Edward Podolsky’s book, Sex Today in Wedded Life, you read, “Be a good listener, let your husband tell you all his troubles and yours will seem trivial in comparison. Don't bother him with petty troubles and complaints when he comes home from work. Let him relax before dinner. Discuss family problems after the inner man has been satisfied. Remember your most important job is to build up and maintain his ego; morale is a woman's business." 

From his advice column, “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” in the Ladies Home Journal, Paul Popenoe maintained that a husband’s job was to work outside the home and provide for his family, while a woman’s job was to keep her husband happy, faithful, and successful at work. A man’s behavior was thought not to reflect his character, but to offer a window inside his home as to what type of woman he was married to, and what type of home environment was contributing to his behavior and success at work. 

And a question I have is, why? Why were so many in the 1950s invested in creating and maintaining split-sphered gender roles? 

Well, from a socio-ecological perspective, if you’re trying to restabilize a society that’s been marked for decades by men leaving the workforce and going to war, and women entering the workforce with higher paying wages than they’ve known before, and then suddenly, both men and women are trying to find their place again in the midst of a culture that looks quite different from the world before they left, then the way to give men and women a sense of purpose and patriotism after World War II is to promote these split-sphere gender roles as a way to continue to serve your country, especially during the Cold War, is by keeping the family strong. For men, the hope was re-entry into the workplace and back into their seat of influence, as before. For women, the hope was that the preoccupation with, and distraction of domesticity, would soften the blow of what they were losing by focusing on all they stood to gain: namely, a happy home, a happy husband, and the social rewards of playing by the rules and conforming to cultural marital scripts. 

Back to the 21st century and messages we’ve received in the church: What messages like this linger? Does this advice seem absurd to you? Or does it seem in line with what you’ve been taught or internalized somewhere along the way? 

Now, I want you to time travel back with me all the way to the early church in the 1st century, about twenty years after Jesus’ death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven. Imagine the legacy left by Jesus in the Greco-Roman world. Imagine trying to understand how to live according to the legacy of a man, who was God, who literally died for your eternal salvation but before that, challenged culture and the status quo by bringing life and health and wholeness and dignity to men, women, rich, poor, Jews, Gentiles, and the most marginalized in society. Imagine His influence as you consider this line which Paul writes to the Christians in Rome in Romans 12:2: “Do not be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” The New Living Translation translates it this way: “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.” 

So my last question for you is, if we’re not to conform to the patterns of this world or copy its behavior, then why does so much of what we’re taught today in the church reflect the culture of 1950s America rather than mirroring Christ? 

If you have thoughts, questions you’d like to eventually have answered on the podcast, or monologues you need to get off your chest, know that I can relate and I would love to hear from you. You’re welcome to email your innermost thoughts to kensi@bravemarriage.com. I’d really like to engage with you and hear where you are and what you’re taking from this season along the way. 

That’s it for today on the Brave Marriage Podcast. I’m your host, Kensi Duszynski. Podcast editing is by Evan Duszynski. Thank you so much for listening and for your interest in learning. If you’ve enjoyed this episode and are excited for this series, please share it with someone else you think might be interested. I’ll be back in 2 weeks to pick up where we left off and I look forward to sharing with you again soon.  

RESOURCES:

Marriage, A History, Stephanie Coontz

Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes Du Mez

Welcome Back to Season 2 on Marriage, Mutuality, and Gender Roles

EPISODE SHOW NOTES:

BMP is back for a second season! Join Kensi Duszynski this fall as she facilitates a conversation around marital health, relational dynamics, and the proper place of gender roles in Christian marriage. Conversations will take place biweekly.

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome back to the Brave Marriage Podcast! A podcast for couples who want to grow as individuals, do marriage with intention, and live mutually empowered, purposeful lives! It has been a while, I know, and I can’t believe how quickly this year has gone by. 

If you’re listening to this, you’re probably already subscribed to the podcast so you most likely already know that I took some time off this year. But just in case you’re new here, here’s kind of the deal: At the beginning of the year, I decided to take a semester off of the podcast in order to teach a counseling class at the college level. And this felt like a really great opportunity, like a growing experience for me, but one I knew I would need to devote time and attention to, seeing as how I’d never taught a day in my life before that! I don’t love public speaking. I’ve pushed myself to do it over the years, because I know it’s important to my calling, but I’ve certainly never lectured or taught for hours on end before that, so I just knew something had to give in order for me to engage that new role well. 

But here’s kind of what’s transpired since. And I want you to know that I’ve really been trying to wrestle down this first episode back. I apologize for the lengthy explanation, as I’m sure some of you would prefer that I just get back to the content, which I totally understand. But after trying to figure out how to jump right in and pick up where we left off, the fact of the matter is, I can’t—and I need to explain why. 

So during class last semester, we were able to have some really engaging discussions around how counseling helps us become healthier as humans and as Christians, and how we integrate those two things, because all of us, no matter how long we’ve known the Lord, still grew up in families, churches, and communities that shaped us for better or worse. You know, they shaped our personalities, the ways we learned to interact with the world, they shaped the skills we have or don’t have to cope and to engage in healthy relationships. 

And of course, in my line of work, I’ve thought about these things for years, having processed my own family background, church background, and context in which I grew up. But what was so fascinating for me to see through teaching was my students on the very front end of this processing. Still discovering who they are, in light of who they want to be, and wrestling through questions around faith and counseling and psychology and theology and their future roles as Christian counselors. 

And it just so happened that as we were talking about all these things, a few professors got together during that same semester to host a series on purity culture. So I facilitated a short discussion with my students in a conversation around this topic, thinking surely, with them being ten years younger than me, that they’d grown up with healthier views than my generation did on sexuality, purity, and gender roles in marriage. But you guys, I was shocked at some of the messaging they’d grown up with, just some really unhealthy views, although maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised, given the conversations my husband, Evan, has had in working with college students.

And so, as you all already know, I am deeply passionate about helping others learn how to do marriage relationships well. And what I’m seeing—both in the culture at large and in the classroom (you know it’s like, once you see it, you can’t look away)— is this subtly, yet deeply distorted way of looking at Christian marriage and of talking about marriage and sex in the church. In a way that doesn’t lead to life and freedom and valuing each other as we should, but instead leads to dysfunction and bondage and diminishing each other. And that’s not who we are as Christians, that’s not who we were created to be in the imago Dei, that’s not what the family of God is supposed to be, and yet, the way we continue to talk about marriage, unthinkingly, just repeating what we’ve heard before, it’s actually continuing the perpetuation of these relational ideals that are not good for everyone across the board. And end up landing twenty-something year olds in my classroom and couples of all ages in my counseling practice having to work through damage done to their relationships and to their psyches sometimes by the church when the church should be the place where we find the most healing and health and help for our relationships. 

So clearly, all of this has led me to the inability to podcast about anything other than this topic for a while, this topic of healthy marital dynamics and our callings and roles as Christian couples. Until I’ve said all I’ve needed to say on it, until you’ve said all you need to think and say on it, and until the conversation around marriage and gender roles in the church looks more hopeful and creative than it does rigid and oppressive. 

A few things have led me to this place: The first is, living on a Christian college campus for the past 4 years. We’ve seen what’s become healthier when it comes to living and relating in Christian community, but we’ve also seen some of the same old, unhealthy teachings from decades past just continue to live in the zeitgeist of the Christian community, and not only that, but we’ve also seen some really unhealthy things strengthen in the Church that are anything but Christlike. So there’s that, and then there’s this: I’ve really felt led over the past couple of years to speak more courageously to some of these topics, but to this point, have failed to do so. I’ve resisted and avoided, quite honestly, talking about these things publicly. I made excuses, all wrapped up in fear because who wants to give a minority voice to the majority Christian culture, right? Certainly, not me. Certainly not me. 

But then after my class, after these conversations (and a slew of others over the past few years), I just knew I couldn’t not address the roles of men and women in marriage anymore, and how our understanding as Christians of these topics affects our marriages, because it affects our mental and emotional health, and therefore, our relational health! 

When I first started the podcast, one of the very first questions I received was, “Which is a better model for Christian marriage: complementarianism or egalitarianism?” 

And if you’ve engaged with that question at all, you know it’s not a small question to answer. 

But at the time, applying my counselor brain to this podcast: I knew I hadn’t yet built a relationship with you guys to be so bold as to initiate that conversation—that’s not really my style of relating. The other part is, beyond my own personal experience with both positions, I hadn’t given that question three years of deep thought, as I have at this point in my professional journey. When I started the podcast, I knew I wanted to be practically helpful to you all, offering short teachings and action steps that would make an immediate difference in marriages for the better. 

And I think, at least, to some degree, this podcast has accomplished that, as you guys have told me or left ratings and reviews saying, “I’ve never heard some of these things before, I’ve never heard marriage or sex talked about in such a positive light in the Christian community.” Not that it’s not out there—there are so many people doing really good work right now around these topics in the church. People I actually hope to talk to in the future on this podcast, so prayers that I’d be able to make some of those connections. But the thing is, the thing I can’t skirt around any longer is that, to those of you for whom this podcast feels different than what you’ve been taught elsewhere, that’s because it is! This isn’t what so many of us are taught! And I think it’s time that I make this teaching even more explicit for you. I want to give you understanding and language that you haven’t had before to engage these conversations in your own home, in your church, and in your community, if you find relational dynamics and gender roles in marriage relevant to your own life, to what you’re passing on to the couples you mentor and to your kids. 

So, a few months later, here we are with the Brave Marriage Podcast shifting direction a bit. Unlike Season 1 I’ll call it, where there was a quick teaching, an action step, followed by a prayer for your marriage, Season 2, if you will, will be more educational, historical, and hopefully, conversational. I would love to hear stories from you and further understand your experience. I would love to talk to other experts specifically around these topics. And I would love for the upcoming episodes to serve as conversation starters in your own home and Christian communities. 

There’s been a lot of talk in the public square about how everybody is deconstructing everything, and how millennials and younger are losing their faith and what does this mean for the future of the church, and more immediate than that, for our kids? 

But listen, what I’m wondering is, is if we can move beyond that fear stuff? Or perhaps more accurately, as my friend reminded me of yesterday, can we add goodness to the conversation despite our fear? And I’m talking to myself here, too, maybe even more than I’m talking to you right now. I am just tired of adults in the room and the loudest adults in the room peddling fear instead of Hope, because we have a hope, y’all! His name is Jesus! And He has not given us a spirit of fear, other people have, but He hasn’t! He’s given us a spirit of power, and of love, and of self-discipline! 2 Timothy 1:7 And personally speaking, I’m tired of being the adult in the room who’s not peddling fear, but equally as bad, is too afraid to speak up. 

So here we are, diving into marriage and gender roles and healthy relational dynamics because I believe that after all the pruning—after all the deconstruction of so many things that we’ve missed the mark on as a church, myself included—that there is fruit to be found. There is love and a Savior who says in John 10:10, “It’s the thief who comes to do nothing else but to kill and steal and destroy, but I have come that you may have life, and an abundant one at that.” 

So I hope you’ll join me on this journey. On this second season of the Brave Marriage Podcast, if you will, where we’ll dive into marriage dynamics from a biblical perspective, a psychological perspective, and a relational systems perspective to see if we can’t create something better as Christian couples, to see if we can’t engage in relationships that emanate life and hope and healing in a hurting and broken world. 

If you’re looking forward to this series, please leave a rating and review if you’re able on Apple Podcasts. And if not, no worries, I completely understand, and I will see the rest of you back here soon.